Varley, Rosemary;
Cowell, Patricia;
Wadnerkar Kamble, Meghana;
Maitreyee, Ramya;
(2025)
Cognitive strategy in verbal fluency: sex differences, menstrual cycle, and menopause effects.
Cognitive Processing
10.1007/s10339-025-01265-w.
(In press).
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Abstract
Cognitive sex differences are shaped by hormone effects on brain development, organisation, structure, function, and ageing. In human speech and language, sex differences and hormone effects are typically studied in the form of performance-based differences (via measures of central tendency) with little attention given to underlying cognitive strategy. This study presents data from 126 healthy adults, aged 20–79 years, from three studies of letter based verbal fluency. Comparisons were conducted based on sex, menstrual cycle phase, and menopause stage to examine total words produced, plus switching and clustering strategy use. The investigation probed differences in performance, underlying cognitive strategies, and correlations between performance and strategy. For performance, there were no statistically significant sex or menopause group differences in total words, number of switches and cluster size. Menstrual cycle differences were significant for switches and cluster size, but not total words. However, there were large effect sizes for correlations between total word performance and strategy measures in some groups; these correlations formed patterns which differed as a function of sex, menstrual cycle phase, and menopausal stage. Words produced were highly correlated with switching in younger women at higher hormone menstrual cycle phases. Correlations between total words and both strategies were moderate and equivalent in older premenopausal and perimenopausal women. Postmenopausal women showed a pattern of higher correlation between total words and cluster size which was observed in younger women at the lower hormone cycle phase, and men. This study illustrates the impact of hormones and sex differences on strategy use in verbal fluency—underscoring the value of comparisons in strategy use between women at different reproductive life stages.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Cognitive strategy in verbal fluency: sex differences, menstrual cycle, and menopause effects |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s10339-025-01265-w |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-025-01265-w |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | Verbal fluency, Sex differences, Menstrual cycle, Menopause, Cognitive strategy, Language |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Language and Cognition |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10206540 |
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